Six out of 165 titles chosen by the Jury, and there is not a single contemporary novel. Two authors have managed not on this list, whose native language is not English.
María Cecilia Barbetta: “Light Up Night”
“‘The facts that are created in this country, in addition to pushing the limits of our imagination, always a little further, so that we must permanently think of something’, commented can the editor of the ballester local scoreboard verse.”
The great facts it is also in María Cecilia Barbettas novel about Argentina at the time of the Dawn of the military dictatorship, in 1974-75. But most of all he is from the lives of the little people, the discuss in car repair shops and hair salons, the tangled political relationships. Far-reaching, with an extensive staff, the 1972 born in Buenos Aires, the author describes the atmosphere in the immigrants dominated the district Ballester. A fluorescent Madonna, vanishing cats, a beautiful nun and a young Detective a role to play, the puzzles are not always resolved, some of the story lines connected only lightly.
María Cecilia Barbetta
Barbetta has studied in Argentina, and English and has lived for 22 years in Berlin. “I love to write in English,” she explained in Interviews. Her story draws from her own memories of the neighborhood in which you grew up. From the distance she creates in her story to more than 500 pages full of Humor and wit to a wide, shimmering Panorama of this but actually so serious time on the eve of the Argentine military dictatorship.
María Cecilia Barbetta: “Night Lights”, S. Fischer Verlag, 2018, 528 Pages
Maxim Biller: “Six Case”
You should know that before you take Maxim Biller’s – for this author, unusually short novel, “Six case” in the Hand: Biller was as a child of Russian Jewish parents, born in 1960 in Prague. After the suppression of the Prague spring of 1970, he emigrated to America with his mother, Rada, the father and the sister, the later a journalist and writer Elena Lappin, to West Germany.
Maxim Biller
Biller’s novel tells of the escape of a family, of what – in this case, even a repeated – move in the Alien and abandoned, unresolved story with your members. The story of this family has a Central mystery and a secret.
“Who do you think is really to blame for the death of your grandfather,” asks the NDR-editor with the “thin curious and, as Jelena was, unfortunately, also quite German mouth” at the end of the book. Who has betrayed the grandfather in 1960, the Soviet secret service? A young man of Jewish-Russian descent, tried to the from the West, in Zurich to find out in six chapters with six different perspectives. In bright light, with ridiculous punchlines, the book as a detective novel to read. But it also poses a great moral question: How can you escape the long shadow of totalitarianism?
Maxim Biller: “Six Case”, Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2018, 201 Pages
Nino Haratischwili: “the cat and The General”
Also as a freelance Director and author living in Hamburg Nino Haratischwili was not born in Germany, but in 1983, in Tbilisi, Georgia. As María Cecilia Barbetta she writes her prose texts and plays in the German language. And there is more Connective to the other titles Shortlisted for 2018: Haratischwili looks back into the abyss, “which have opened up between the rubble of the crumbling Soviet Empire”, as the blurb from the publisher. It is the story of the Russian oligarch Alexander Orlov, of “the General” to address issues of crime and punishment and the mechanisms of the war.
Nino Haratischwili
“It was impossible to trust this man, he wore too much despair, too much self-hatred, too much contempt. He would have to painfully discharged, and nobody was in front of this discharge, for sure.”
Haratischwilis narrative leads back to the year 1994, when your heroine is 17 years old. In the North Caucasus, the young Chechen woman is raped Nura and murdered. The guilt remains unpunished. In Berlin, the time of reckoning has come. Nino Haratischwilis novel reads with his short, clear sentences as a Thriller. The real tragedy, and the moral Dimension opens up only in the reversal of the stylistic understatement.
Nino Haratischwili: “the cat and The General”, Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, 750 pages
Inger-Maria Mahlke: “Archipelago”
Also Inger-Maria Mahlke’s looking back in the past, however, a little further than Barbetta. Her novel begins in the year 2015 and tells about several generations back more and more to progressively have a family history on the Canary island of Tenerife. There, in Lübeck, Germany, in 1977 in Hamburg-born author and criminologist grew up. In her novel she takes a century journey, with many loving Details and a beginning that is reminiscent of Musil’s “man without qualities”:
“It is the 9. July 2015, four of the ten o’clock and two, three petty minutes, in La Laguna, the ancient capital of the archipelago, is the air temperature of 29.1 degree, to seventeen PM, you will reach twenty-seven with 31.3 degrees your daily maximum. The sky is clear, cloudless, and so bright blue that it could also be white.”
Inger-Maria Mahlke
Mahlkes tone remains laconic, Spanish and Canarian terms prevail appealing to the language of the novel, in which she tells of the on the island returned Pink and their grandfather Julio. From the upheavals and turmoil of his century, the civil war, in which he was a courier of the partisan and prisoner of the fascists, as he’s the Keeper now, as an old man, the door of a nursing home. There’s a simple woman without a name, the name all just “the cat”. And since the once-influential Bernadottes, the contrast between the big bourgeois-colonial life and the lives of the little people. The Building and Wieses, Moore’s and González’ – a people directory at the end of the book helps to keep track of them.
Mahlke is not told chronologically. She changes the perspective, jumping from the private tragedies of her Felipe’s and Ana’s in the history and creating an aesthetically pleasing, from the circumference told epic of the history of Europe in the 20th century. Century.
Inger-Maria Mahlke: Archipelago, Rowohlt Verlag, 432 Pages
Susanne Röckel: “The Bird God”
The bird God is a Carrion stinking vultures, but to his followers he appears as a powerful and worship-worthy God, and this cult disciples even a little bit bird-like. Discovered, and what, in retrospect, clearly, also killed, has made him the teacher and bird hunter Konrad Weyde, somewhere in the folds of the civilized world, in a harsh, dilapidated village. Weye leaves behind an unpublished manuscript that testifies to the sinister Power of the bird:
“Yes, I would disappear – and that of my children and their children -from the light to forget, would dissolve our outlines, our body would become blurred with the shadow of the earth, and the darkness of the universe would remain on the eyes and if swallowed – this God, whose authority I could not doubt that he would…”
Susanne Röckel
Röckel describes after this prologue, the encounter with the bird-God from the three different perspectives of Weyes children. In a very different way, succumb to the pull of the mythical creature, fascinated by his cult. The failed student of medicine Theodor follows him in a not exactly pinpointed, loin area, the former British, once a tourist colony Aza. But instead of children in Aza-Town help, he is kept from the action. After a blood frenzy, he ends up in the madhouse. His sister, the artist Dora is lost in an altarpiece, “The Madonna with the wild strawberry” in which it seeks to decrypt an earlier massacre of the cult. The Journalist Lorenz reveals, finally, what Makes the followers of the bird God, even today.
Susanne Röckel kidnapped in her novel in a dark, secret world. However, this seemingly so undefined, mysterious world with their violence and Nature of hostility appears at the end of our presence more and more similar.
Susanne Röckel: The bird-God, the young and the Young publishing house, 272 pages
Stephan Thome: “God of the barbarians”
This novel could only write a sinologist. Stephan Thome studied philosophy, religious studies and Sinology, lives since 2005, and he is working in Taiwan’s capital of Taipei. He is in the Chinese history and culture at home. His previous novels, some of which were already on the Shortlist for the German book prize nominated, acted always in Germany, in his native Hesse. This time he has let the history of his adopted homeland China for inspiration.
With the opium wars of 1840-42, the semi-colonial dependency of China began. The British Empire forced the Opening of the ports and flooded the country with Opium. The Chinese silver currency flowed – the rich impoverished. In a second opium war in 1860, the Englishman in China dropped even more. It is a fascinating story that at the same time in the Interior of the country, a Christian and egalitarian-motivated Rebellion against the Imperial house arose, headed by the mystic Hong Xiuquan. He wanted to create a Kingdom with a utopian moves, a Kingdom of heaven on earth: the “Taiping also acted”. The Taiping rebellion was defeated in a year-long Fight by the Qing army. He demanded tens of millions of victims.
Stephan Thome
Stephan Thome uses this historical Scene as a documentary film for its captivating novel. Many of his figures are historically documented. The other, fictional for atmosphere: His Hero, the young missionary Philip, the breaks in 1850, rather randomly, after China, and as a Fei-Li-Pu, joins the rebels. However, his hopes for a better world will be disappointed, he flees along with another missionary:
“‘The God of justice and of the Brave’, the language of the missionary, according to. ‘Because you command it, we leave the city, which should have been the new Jerusalem and the new Sodom. The reigns here, is called your son, and is in truth the one, it says: broken All to his idols and to be the hire of a whore shall be burnt with fire. So your Holy Grimm meet because the city and kill what is in them, fornication, covetousness, evil desire, and idolatry.'”
Thome is a Chinese historical novel full of feelings, moods, colors, and odors do not succeed without exoticist view: He projected from the outside, but told from the inside, and without the desire to fulfill cheesy expectations.
Stephan Thome: God of the barbarians, Suhrkamp, 720 pages